All posts by Laurel Byrnes

The history of the modern circus is deeply rooted in horsemanship. The first modern circuses, which took place during the 18 century, were primarily demonstrations of tricks performed on a horse, first by former soldiers who learned such skills during military training, and later by talented men and women trained from a young age to accomplish acrobatics and other feats atop a horse. In order to teach horses to perform tricks for the circus amphitheater, horsemen relied upon instruction from mentors and in books such as Dr. Sutherland’s System of Educating the Horse, with Rules for Teaching the Horse Some Forty Different Tricks or Feats.

When you think of the largest creatures in the ocean, what do you picture? You might be surprised about which creatures are largest, and about some of their fascinating histories and habits! A recent article in the journal PeerJ documents the body length of some of the longest animals in the ocean, and in preparation for World Oceans Day on June 8, we’re diving deeper into the top ten listed in that article.

When you think of an “heirloom plant”, you may be imagining a plant that has changed little in over a hundred years—something our great- great-grandparents would have farmed and eaten. However, the definition of an heirloom plant is a bit more fluid than that, and not only includes edibles but also plants such as flowers, herbs, bulbs, and shrubs.  In fact, there is no singular consensus on how many years a plant has to have remained unchanged to be considered an heirloom. Some groups use cut-off dates—meaning dates after which the plant has not changed. For instance, 1940 is the cut-off date used by the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virigina.

My interest in the Smithsonian Institution, as an entity, began a long time ago when I was a young girl. I came to DC with my middle school to visit the National Museum of Natural History and since that trip, I was completely in love with museums and wanted to know how they operated–how all of those magical exhibits came to be, who was responsible for making that happen, and all of the different people who got to work together to make this large organization thrive.

In celebration of Beatrix Potter’s birthday on July 28th, 1866, today’s book of the week explores rabbits: The Rabbit, by James Edmund Harting, with a Chapter on Cookery, by Alexander Innes Shand.  This book was published in 1898 as part of the Fur, Feather and Fin Series, edited by A. E. T.